Presented with sadness, not comment:

Female bombers struck Kurdish political protesters in Kirkuk and Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad on Monday morning, leaving at least 48 people dead and 249 wounded in one of the bloodiest sequences of attacks in Iraq this year.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, at least 24 people were killed and 187 wounded, after a female suicide bomber blew herself up amid thousands of Kurdish demonstrators who had gathered near the provincial headquarters building, said Brig. Gen. Burhan Tayyib Taha of the Iraqi police in Kirkuk. The bombing immediately set the city on edge. Many Kurds believed the city’s ethnic Turkmen were behind the blast and retaliated by attacking the headquarters of Turkmen political parties.

In the attacks in Baghdad, three women used suicide vests and a bomb in a bag to make strikes just minutes apart, killing 24 people, all apparently Shiite pilgrims marching in a festival, according to an official at the Interior Ministry. The dead included at least four children, one of them an infant, and there were at least 62 other people wounded, according to police officials and witnesses.

Thank Bast the surge...worked?